


Kaleidoscope: Summer

by angelinthecity



Series: Kaleidoscope [2]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Beach House, Bonfires, Cape Cod, Established Relationship, Fluff, Happy Ending, Jealousy, Light Angst, Lots of Beautifully Sleepy Elio, M/M, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-05-18 20:24:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19341967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: A sequel toKaleidoscope, where Elio and Oliver reconnected over six days in Paris.Now, Oliver takes Elio to his family’s summer place on Cape Cod to escape a heat wave. Surprise encounters stir up unresolved issues during their time by the ocean, but through it all, their bond emerges stronger than ever.“It’s the fresh seaside air. And you.” I mouthed at the curve of Oliver’s bare shoulder. Always you.[COMPLETED Aug 5, 2019]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I missed these versions of the boys, so I ended up writing this little summer sequel. I hope you’ll enjoy; on your lunch breaks or on your days off, out in the sunshine or comfortably in the shade. Chilled apricot juice optional.
> 
> This is technically a stand-alone story, but many of the details will make much more sense if you read Part 1 of this series, [Kaleidoscope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16738087/chapters/39263239), first.

**Cape Cod, MA**

**July, 1988**

 

 

Our first clue was the glasses of sherry on the porch when we arrived.

“Has someone been here?” Oliver asked, his question more rhetorical than addressed to me specifically.

Leaning my cheek on the side of his shoulder, I shrugged. I had never been to his family’s summer place on Cape Cod before, but I suspected that the crystal goblets weren’t just a part of their outdoor décor. We tried to listen for any unusual sounds, but could only hear the shrieks from the seagulls on the beach behind us.

Oliver’s hand left my waist as he ventured inside the cottage. I followed him as he peeked into the white-washed, wood-paneled rooms, expecting to find an intruder or perhaps a sign that someone had been there rummaging for valuables. If that someone was still there, hiding, I trusted Oliver to be able to take care of it, but I still couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy.

However, the case of the mystery was closed quickly when a woman’s voice echoed from a room in the back, relaxed.

“Did you come back already, Richard?”

A slender older woman appeared in the narrow hallway, carrying a sprawling bouquet of wild flowers in her arms. She stopped at the sight of us and I wasn’t sure whether she or Oliver took the prize in being more surprised.

“Oliver!”

“Mother?”

Oliver was too stunned to feign that this was a happy surprise and his posture tensed up at once.

Their reunion resembled nothing like a scene between my mother and me would have been: hugs or kisses were not exchanged, and I wondered if Oliver had rather found an actual intruder in the cottage. He had once said he had to be a different version of himself when his mother was around, and I now witnessed it with my own eyes.

As far as Oliver’s mother was concerned, she may very well have been delighted to see her son, but none of her joy was detectable as she stood frozen in her spot. “What are you doing here, Oliver?”

“I told you I was coming here the last week of July. But why are _you_ here? You never use the cottage anymore.”

His mother skipped over the question, somewhat frantic. “I distinctly remember you saying last week of August.”

“No, I said July. Why would I have said August when I’m going to–“ Then something else occurred to Oliver. “Wait, who’s Richard?”

“Who?”

“You asked if I was someone called Richard, when I came in.” When Oliver didn’t get an answer from her, he prodded further. “Mother?”

She walked past Oliver and laid the flowers from her arms on a side table, reaching for the top shelf of a cupboard for a vase. “He’s… He’s a friend, Oliver.”

The top shelf would have been at an easy height for Oliver to access, but instead, he let his mother climb on a stool and only asked, arms now crossed: “A friend? How come I’ve never heard of him?”

“He is a friend of the Eisenbergs, too. You do know them, Oliver, don’t be silly. Richard has agreed to come and fix the roof of the shed here. You know I can’t do it myself. And he used to be a carpenter.”

Her evasive explanation only seemed to raise more questions in Oliver, but he didn’t say anything.

It looked like neither of them remembered my existence in their confused state, so I cleared my throat.

“Hello, I’m Elio.”

“Yes, Elio, of course.” Oliver turned around as if he really had forgotten I was there. “This is my mother, Margaret. And Elio is…Professor Perlman’s son. I told you he might come for a visit this summer.”

Might come?

As if I hadn’t just spent two weeks with him in Boston in the midst of a stifling July heat wave, waiting for his summer classes to finish so that we could escape to the seaside for a week. As if we hadn’t made these plans back in April when we parted at the Schwechat airport in Vienna, and as if I hadn’t counted the days since then, through the struggles of the late spring, living for the moment when I would at least get to see him again? As if we hadn’t fantasized for the past two weeks how we would have all the privacy we could ever want once we would get to Cape Cod? How out here, we wouldn’t have to be quite as discreet as on the streets of Boston for the constant fear that we run into someone Oliver knows?

I was surprised at his twisting of facts now, but I couldn’t blame him entirely.

I had never asked Oliver specifically whether he had told his mother anything about me, about us. From what he had told me, Oliver’s fresh divorce from his wife Helen had been difficult enough for his mother to process, so I hadn’t wanted to press the subject of us with him. It hadn’t mattered really, because I had not expected to be introduced to her any time soon anyway.

But now I was standing in front of her, and it was becoming painfully clear that his mother, indeed, knew nothing about me, except that I was my father’s son.

“Nice to meet you, Elio. This must be very different from your family’s country house.”

She was polite and her eyes were kind; both further clues that she had no idea I wasn’t just his son’s favorite mentor’s offspring on a stateside visit, a favor returned after we had hosted Oliver years ago in the middle of the hottest Italian summer. I doubted she would have been quite as courteous, had she known that his son’s nights had been equally sweat-filled as his days and that I had been by far the biggest the reason for those.

“Yes, somewhat different than our villa, but it looks very charming here,” I said.

I didn’t dare to look directly at Oliver, as he observed us, tense. He was most likely wondering how he would manage this unexpected meeting between the oblivious parent and the lover that was supposed to act as if he wasn’t one.

“So, are you going to be hosting your guest here all weekend, Oliver?” Margaret started arranging her flowers in the vase. After the shaky start, she was beginning to regain control of the situation.

“In fact, we came for the whole week, mother.”

It was a Friday evening. We had driven down from Boston as soon as Oliver had dropped off the last of his papers at his office in the afternoon. He had a full week off from the university, so we had planned to stay until the next Sunday.

“Right. Of course. Richard and I are only staying for the weekend, so I’m sure there is room for all of us here for the three days. You two can take the bedrooms upstairs.”

Bedrooms, in plural.

“Right.” Oliver rubbed his face, and unlike her mother, was still trying to assess what level of a disaster this was going to be. I wished I could have held his hand, done anything at all to ease his worries. I wondered if she could see his turmoil too. Whether she knew how he looked like when he was shaken, sad, upset, or whether he had learned to hide those feelings from her.

Despite Oliver’s worry, I had to admit I was mostly intrigued myself. Indeed, I hadn’t expected to meet Oliver’s mother yet, but now that she was here, I was curious.

“And where’s this Richard, now?” Oliver asked.

“I’m here,” said a booming voice behind us, and a man carrying an armful of chopped wood came in the front door. Behind the stack of firewood there was a full head of swirly gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard and in between them, friendly brown eyes. I immediately thought of a rugged but kind sea captain from one of my childhood stories. “Have we received guests, Maggie?”

“Richard, this is my son, Oliver. And his friend, Elio.”

I had gotten used to not expecting too much, and I was aware of the realities, but every time I was introduced to someone as Oliver’s friend, I couldn’t claim there wasn’t a little sting. For one, it had taken us so long to get where we were that to not have it acknowledged was a pity. Secondly, mere friendship had maybe covered the first couple of weeks of our acquaintance but after that, whether we had been together or apart, we had never been just friends.

Oliver eyed Richard with a measuring look but his manners took over, and he offered to take the split logs off of Richard and shook his hand cordially.

“Did you and Elio have any bags with you, Oliver?” Margaret asked.

“Yes, but they are still in the car.”

“I can go get them,” I offered, and Richard said he would come and help me.

 

 

“You two picked a good time to come, the upcoming weekend and week are supposed to be rather dry,” Richard said as we started to unload the trunk of Oliver’s car.

“That’s good to hear. This is my first time on Cape Cod.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, my family usually spends summers in Italy, we have a villa there, near Milan.”

“That sounds magnificent.”

“It is nice. That’s how I got to know Oliver, actually. He came for a summer residence with my father. He’s a professor in archeology.”

“Are you in their field, too?”

“No, I play piano. I just graduated from the Milan Conservatory and I’ll be applying to Juilliard next year.” Every time I told someone about my plans out loud, it filled my heart equally with excitement and trepidation. If I managed to get in to Juilliard, it would be everything I had ever dreamed of, but I still had a long way to go.

Richard was lifting my luggage from the trunk, but stopped in his tracks and laid it back down. “Wait, Milan Conservatory… Have you been taught by, what were their names…”

Richard listed a short string of locally notable performers who sometimes taught at the Conservatory. I told him that yes, I had taken their classes and with some exceptions, most of them were actually very well-liked among the students.

“That’s wonderful. I’ve heard very good things about them but have never had the privilege of hearing any of them play live.”

I wondered how a carpenter from New England would be familiar with Milanese musicians. “How do you know about them?”

“Oh, just something I have picked up over the years. But you are correct, they are very underrated as performers and not many people know them outside Italy, I would assume. Now, are these bags all that you two had? Let’s get back to the house, we need to open a bottle of sparkling for this unexpected reunion.”

I wanted to ask Richard more about his musical interests, but Margaret’s demeanor about him had been so vague that I decided it was best not to pry and let things unfold on their own. If they ever would, that is. But at the very least, I decided that I liked Richard already.

 

 

Richard repeated his suggestion about the sparkling wine after he and I had taken my and Oliver’s luggage to the two bedrooms upstairs.

“Why don’t we open one of those bottles of prosecco, Maggie, for this happy occasion?”

He seemed to be at home at the cottage, heading directly for the small wine cabinet and making Margaret’s earlier comment about him being here only to help her with the shed more than a little dubious.

Oliver and his mother both agreed with Richard’s suggestion, but their initial wariness of the entire situation hadn’t completely disappeared. They clearly hadn’t decided yet whether all of this was going to play out as a harmless reunion, or as an intense drama about family secrets.

Margaret brought flute glasses to the porch and after opening the bottle and toasting with us, Richard disappeared back inside to the kitchen.

“He likes to cook, too,” Margaret waved after him as a way of explaining, as she, her son, and I sat down around the small, wind-weathered table on the porch.

“So what is he really doing here,” Oliver asked his mother after the door had closed behind Richard. “Besides cooking and bringing firewood and serving prosecco. He calls you Maggie, so I doubt he’s just a handyman helping with the roof.”

Margaret placed her glass carefully on the coaster on the table. She cleared her throat, ready to be on the defense and not realizing that her son’s reasons for being proactive in his questioning might have had something to do with distracting her from his own secrets.

“I told you, he’s a friend of the Eisenbergs. I met him at their holiday party.”

“And that was, what, six, seven months ago?”

“He has come by the house every now and then. And now to the cottage in the summer. He’s a widower, too. We cook dinner and I get to have a conversation with someone.”

“Conversation. Right. Is he after your money?”

“Oliver!” Even given the situation, Margaret’s tone was unexpectedly sharp. ”That is not what this is. It’s been lonely since your father died, Oliver. Spending time with Richard has been good to me.”

“It’s just surprising. You haven’t said anything.”

Like mother, like son, I thought, but stayed quiet.

“There isn’t anything to tell. It’s just been nice to have company.”

“I guess I’m glad if you’re happy, mother, I just wish you could have told me so that I wouldn’t have needed to run into a strange man at our cottage.”

Richard’s gray beard peeked out of the front door at that moment, asking if anyone wanted to offer a helping hand at setting the table.

I started to get up but was quickly shushed by Margaret who jumped up to call it nonsense, insisting I was a guest. Half of it was probably due to genuine hospitality, half due to her relief at getting an excuse to escape his son’s interrogation.

 

 

After Margaret followed Richard inside, Oliver and I had our first moment alone after arriving. We spoke in hushed tones.

“I’m sorry. I really had no idea she would be here.”

“It’s okay,” I said and instinctively reached over to touch his arm to calm him down. He glanced at the door reflexively, worried that someone would see. I pulled my hand back.

“Still, I’m sorry,” he said again, and placed his hand on my thigh under the table. It was out of the view if anyone came back to the porch, and he gently rubbed my knee with his thumb.

“Don’t be. She seems nice. And Richard, too.”

“Yeah, well,” he huffed. “I wonder how nice she would be if she knew about–“, Oliver waved vaguely between me and him.

“Have you thought about…” I still didn’t want to make him feel pressured.

“Of course. And I know I need to, at some point.” He looked at me apologetically. “This is just so sudden. I was not prepared for this at all, and all I know is she’s not going to take it well. I hope you understand?”

It pained my heart, but of course I did, and I told him so.

“I will first wait for her to become enamored with you and then it’s too late for her to back down,” Oliver teased.

I leaned back in my chair. “That may take a while.”

“For her to become enamored with you? In my experience, it happens quite fast when one meets you and there’s no turning back.”

Oliver looked at me tenderly, and I was transported back to the villa and to our blushed conversations of _when did you first_ and _how did you know,_ spotted with kisses and the delirium of realizing neither of us had been alone in our feelings after all _._

Oliver’s thumb did the rubbing thing again on my knee and I so, so wished we had been alone. Instead, Margaret called us inside for dinner.

 

 

The dinner table was set tastefully with blue and white napkins and matched china, and Richard had made fish with a béchamel type of a sauce. It was all served with crisp, chilled white wine.

“This is delicious,” I said already after a few bites as I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “You’re a great cook, Richard.”

“I have plenty of practice, I grew up cooking for my siblings. Now, after retiring I’ve had more time to get back to honing my skills.”

“I would feel sacrilegious saying this was as good as what our Mafalda makes, but it’s very close. She specializes in pasta, though.”

Richard was immediately interested and said he had lately started to look into the finer variations between pasta dishes. Before we knew it, we had delved into the differences between ravioli and casoncelli as Richard eagerly served me another cut of the fish and a generous helping of the sauce.

Had I paid attention, I would have noticed that Oliver and his mother looked on at the two of us, stunned into silence by my and Richard’s easy camaraderie.

 

 

As the dinner went on and nothing catastrophic happened, both Oliver and his mother started to relax; Margaret letting her guard down and Oliver visibly leaning back in his seat next to me.

“This Mafalda, she’s your cook?” Margaret finally interjected. Maybe she was feeling left out by Richard’s monopolization of her son’s guest.

“Cook, maid, part of the family, really. Oliver was his favorite of all the summer residents.”

Oliver looked bashful. For all his assured manliness, I loved when I was able to reduce him to a schoolboy that had just received unexpected praise. I usually loved kissing the spot high on his left cheek that flushed with the brightest color, but now that was obviously out of the question.

“I don’t remember you mentioning her, Oliver,” Margaret scolded. “In fact, you never told me much at all about your time in Italy.”

I remembered Oliver’s wife, ex-wife, Helen using almost the exact same words at our dinner in Paris, the first and only time I had met her.

Oliver shrugged and sighed as if it was difficult to decide where to start. “There wasn’t much to tell beyond the daily life. Professor Perlman helped me a lot with my manuscript. We usually worked in the morning, and then rested on the afternoon, or Elio showed me the town and the surroundings.”

“So you two walked around on your own?” Margaret’s words could’ve been interpreted as suspicious, but her tone was not.

“Walked, biked. Swam in the river.” _Wrestled. Kissed in the woods._

“An insular atmosphere like that forges friendships fast, doesn’t it,” Richard commented.

“It does,” I dared to confirm. “All of our summer residents become part of the family quickly.”

“And Elio would play the piano inside all the time, or the guitar out in the garden.” Then, as if he had revealed too much, Oliver added: “While Professor Perlman and I would work on organizing his archives.”

“I really must thank your family for your generosity, Elio,” Margaret said sincerely. “It is a big undertaking, hosting a guest, and a stranger at that, within one’s family for six weeks.”

“We all enjoyed having him stay with us.” I was equally sincere, while the notion of Oliver as a stranger seemed unfathomable to me now that I knew intimately every tiniest groove on the soles of his feet.

“While my son didn’t tell me much, that summer did him good. He did come back seemingly a different person.”

Oliver was about to take a sip of his wine but halted his glass mid-air. “You’ve never said that to me, mother.”

It was Margaret’s turn to shrug. “Why would you tell someone something like that? Wouldn’t they already know that about themselves? Besides, we didn’t see you much back then. You were so involved with everything in the city. You and Helen hardly ever had time to visit.”

The mention of his ex-wife cast a sudden awkward shadow over the conversation. Oliver got visibly uncomfortable and I tried to act as if her name had no special significance to me.

Luckily Richard took it upon himself to dig us out of the moment. “Now it’s Oliver’s turn to show you around the Cape, then.“

“The beaches are beautiful here,” Margaret chimed in. “If you know where to go, you can sometimes see seals, turtles, lots of starfish. Oliver loved the starfish as a child. He would play on the beach with his friends, and the other boys would keep kicking the ball or throwing a frisbee, but Oliver would get distracted by the things the waves brought in.”

I liked thinking of a child Oliver, combing the beach, gleeful at finding treasures. Would we have played together if time and space had contorted to allow us to be kids at the same time?

”Yes, until I learned that while they are pretty, the starfish eat oysters and mussels and can steal the fishermen’s bounty,” Oliver said grimly and flushed the last of his fish down with the wine.

“How morose. I would still like to see them,” I said and Margaret promised to tell me the best stretches of the beach to spot them.

 

 

The dinner continued in the same spirit of short bouts of awkwardness in between cordial reminiscing of their summers here on Cape Cod and our summer in Crema.

Eventually, after the night had already fallen, I failed at stifling a yawn and it prompted Margaret to suggest that Oliver should let his guest retreat for the night already.

“It’s been a long day for him, with your driving down here and everything.”

We wished them goodnight and climbed upstairs, loudly wishing each other goodnight on the upstairs landing and making sure that two separate bangs of doors closing could be heard.

 

 

“I cannot believe we are doing this again,” I whispered and closed the door behind me as quietly as I could. I tiptoed to Oliver’s bed, careful not to cause the floorboards to creak.

He held out his hand to pull me on the bed. Behind the closed doors, he was my Oliver again. “I’m sorry. I will tell her, I just need a bit of time.”

“And in the mean time I have to pretend to sleep in your guest room.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m horny,” I stretched myself along Oliver’s side.

Oliver was incredulous. “How is that possible? After three hours of dinner drudgery with my mother and her...whatever it is that Richard is.”

“It’s the fresh seaside air. And you.” I mouthed at the curve of Oliver’s bare shoulder.

_Always you._

He let me kiss him, which was a sweet release of the evening’s length of time of not touching him. However, when I tried to relieve him of his pajama bottoms, he stopped my hand.

“We can’t, Elio. Not here. Not while my mother is in the same house.”

I squinted and examined the small, tan birthmark on the side of his nose, the one that you couldn’t see unless you looked very closely. “If I recall correctly, you had no trouble when my parents were in the same house.”

“Yes, but they were your parents, not mine. To be honest, I don’t know how you did it.”

“Being seventeen overrode a lot of things. Can’t we do at least something?” I begged. “I’ll be quiet, I promise.”

“You’re never quiet.”

“I will be if there’s something in my mouth.”

Oliver kissed my pouting bottom lip but remained adamant despite my tries at further negotiations. “They will be here only for the weekend. We’ll have plenty of time after they leave.”

I whispered to him all the things that I had been looking forward to doing with him, to him, under him, on top of him here.

“We’ve done all of those in Boston,” he chuckled quietly, not trying to deter me but to keep me talking as that was all we would be afforded right now.

“And I learned exactly how you like them. Besides, it was so hot and humid in the city that everything will be much different now that I’m not sticking to you the whole time.”

“What if I like you sticking to me?”

Back in the city, Oliver had kept complaining about the sweltering heat but had made no attempts to stop me from sleeping entangled in him, our sweaty limbs intertwined and sticking together no matter how much we tried to cool his small apartment at night. Having to detach from him in the mornings had been my least favorite thing about waking up.

Oliver laid his head to my chest as he always did on the nights when he most felt like giving in, letting go of whatever his worries of the day were, and letting me hold him while he fell asleep.

“This weekend will be fine,” I assured him quietly as I caressed his temple.

“I hope so,” he murmured but exhausted from the taxing evening, fell asleep almost mid-sentence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. I loved returning to these characters, but writing wouldn’t be nearly as fun if I weren’t able to share it with you all at the end. 
> 
> Chapter 2 coming up next Monday.


	2. Chapter 2

We woke up in each other’s arms when the first rays of early morning sun trickled into the room. The sleep had been much more pleasant here than in the city, the slight coolness of the ocean air allowing me to seek warmth from Oliver’s body and I had nestled my face into his chest.

“Are you making me go into the other guest room to muss up the sheets?” I mumbled, eyes still closed as Oliver’s thumb made attempts at smoothing the creases that his shirt had left on my cheek.

Oliver was apologetic. “I will talk to my mother. I just need to find the right moment. But if she finds us both here now…”

I didn’t need him to finish the sentence. I tore myself away from him reluctantly, making a show of depriving him of a morning kiss as my revenge, and found my way to the other guest room across the landing.

It was still early, and we had sat at the dinner table till the late hours the previous night, so I decided to lay down on the untouched bed for a moment, to make it look believable that someone had slept there.

 

 

I ended up falling asleep between the soft sheets for an hour or two more, and when I finally managed to trudge downstairs, the others were already gathering around the breakfast table in the cottage’s small kitchen.

It smelled like coffee, Richard was reading the morning paper with glasses perched on his nose and Oliver pulled a chair for me next to himself.

I had changed into a different t-shirt and shorts before coming down but had forgotten to take a look in the mirror. I could see from Oliver’s face that he wanted to smooth my hair the way he often did in the mornings when it was pointing in all directions. He caught himself in time and I gave him a small smile and lifted my hand to do it myself.

Besides the hair smoothing, we had quickly fallen into a full morning routine after I had arrived at Oliver’s apartment in Boston: he made the coffee and toast; I would crack his egg as he still couldn’t do it properly. Thus, even though I was still half-asleep I was able to function and get through the breakfast as if running on autopilot.

Still, I wasn’t of much help in the conversation. Luckily, it didn’t seem like I was expected to be; Margaret talked about the weather and Oliver commented, occasionally pointedly, on the local news items that Richard read out loud from the paper, after which Margaret tried to soften her son’s expressions with a _there, there_.

I observed them over my cup of coffee. Even with the truce seemingly in place between them, no affections were exchanged between Oliver and his mother beyond the occasional pat on an arm, and I couldn’t help but compare to – and miss – my own family that would have given and received a round of morning kisses.

 

  
Oliver suggested that he and I would take care of cooking for lunch; it would only be fair since his mother and Richard had made dinner the previous evening.

As much as it was thoughtful, it was also his way of getting us away from the house for a bit, since the plan involved a trip to the grocery store in the village.

“What did you plan to make?” I asked as we headed out of the gate and towards the village by foot.

Already regretting my early morning tantrum, I had tried to kiss him as soon as we were out of the view of the cottage, but Oliver had rebuffed my intentions. His mother’s appearance had made him retreat into his shell and he was afraid people would see; it had been a couple of years since he had last been here, but people still knew him.

Handholding was also out of the question. Maybe later, if we took a walk on the empty beach, I thought, and Oliver promised we would find time for ourselves.

“How about that simple pasta that Mafalda always made when your father announced that he was hungry and needed something ahead of dinner?” Oliver now suggested. “Do you remember what goes in it?”

“I think it’s mostly just tomatoes and parmigiano. Or grana padano, if they have it here. Luckily, that pasta is one of the things he is still allowed to eat.”

“How is he doing? When did you last call them?” Oliver asked, worry in his tone and with a light brush on my shoulder.

“Yesterday morning while you were at work. He was doing fine, a little irritated that he couldn’t get back to his manuscripts yet. But maman is good at making him stay still.”

“I do hope they manage to come here at some point. I would love to show them this place.”

Oliver’s wish referred to more than just the notion that my parents wouldn’t bear to leave Crema during the most blooming days of summer.

According to our original plan hatched in Vienna, I would have joined Oliver in Boston as soon as my school ended in June. However, my father had had issues with his heart late spring, and even though he had been released from the hospital in Milan quite soon and there had not been a need for a surgery, I hadn’t wanted to leave until his condition had stabilized. Thus, I had only joined Oliver in the States in mid-July, and the whole time he had been just as worried about my father as I had been.

“I hope he makes a full recovery,” Oliver said quietly. “He’s always felt like a father figure to me, more than my own father ever did, really. And this was much before there was even a hint about thinking of him as a father-in-law.”

To distract us from the gloomy subject, I teased him. “But you might be getting a stepfather soon, right?”

“Richard?” Oliver huffed. “Oh, I don’t know about him.”

“He seems okay to me,” I said. Something about Richard told me there was more good things to him than Oliver seemed to think, but he would need time. Despite him knowing that her mother had eventually found a renewed interest in the world after his father’s death, it had all come as a surprise. “Maybe you if you talked to your mother, to find out how serious she actually is about him?”

“She’s not like your parents, Elio. Talking is not what we do in our family.”

“Maybe you could try?”

“Even if I did, she wouldn’t reciprocate. Pretending the uncomfortable doesn’t exist, changing the subject to something trivial whenever something she finds unpleasant is brought up. Those are her forte.”

 

 

Unlike the reception we had gotten from his mother, the welcome Oliver received at the village’s small grocery store was warm.

“Oliver! Oh my goodness, is that really you?”

The lady tending the cashier’s desk came rushing around the counter to kiss him on both cheeks. It amused me and reminded me of his popularity among the ladies, both young and old, in Crema.

“Mrs. Henderson. So nice to see you again. We’ve come to get our ingredients for an Italian style lunch we’re making at the house,” Oliver announced.

Mrs. Henderson scurried ahead to take us to her fresh produce section and while she asked Oliver about his mother and proceeded to tell him the news of the village, I inspected the baskets full of fruit and vegetables.

“I can see you are no stranger to good food. You clearly know what you’re doing,” she told me as she caught me carefully inspecting the fuzz on the peaches, running my thumb on the skin of the apricots, feeling the tomatoes in my hand trying to gauge which ones Mafalda would have chosen.

Oliver stood behind her and he swallowed.

“We... We also need some milk. The dairy room is still in the back, right?”

Mrs. Henderson nodded and Oliver took the tomatoes from my hand, placed them in the basket and gently started pushing me towards the back of the store.

 

 

We were barely inside the cold room, the door closing behind us and leaving us alone with the steady hum of the dairy refrigerators, when Oliver leaned in to kiss me behind my ear and whisper: “Seeing you caress those firm, smooth tomatoes did things to me.”

“Oliver, no! You said yourself,–” I protested as he pressed against me and his nose nuzzled the curls at the nape of my neck. “That people can see!”

“Can you see anyone here right now?” Oliver asked waving around the empty room, playfully squeezing between my ribs. “Can you? Can you?”

I laughed and, trying to avoid his fingers, backed away until I was up against the tallest refrigerator, the cool glass door pressing against my back.

“Ahh, this is cold!”

Oliver scooped one hand behind my shoulders, doing his best to provide insulation between me and the door, as his other hand pulled me from the waist to his warm body.

“Of course it’s cold. But I’ll warm you up,” he murmured and hushed me by kissing me fully on the lips.

The taste of Oliver’s mouth stirred up the familiar sensations in me and I sank my fingers in his wind-blown hair, my pulse quickening further at the thought that anyone could come in at any moment.

That was not what we were looking for, however, so after several long kisses, quite a few of them landing far from my lips, we reluctantly prepared to return to the main store before Mrs. Henderson would come look for us. _The city kids, locking themselves in the cold room by accident._

On our way out, I suppressed my giggles and tried to wipe the thoroughly-kissed look off of my face, as Oliver grinned and picked up more cartons of milk than we actually needed to firmly hide our tracks.

At the cashier, Mrs. Henderson commented how quickly the cold must have gotten to us, turning our cheeks all red. I cupped my cheek instinctively and, trying to save at least Oliver from getting even redder, I slipped outside to wait for him.

 

 

When we returned to the cottage with the grocery bags, laughing after our escapades, Oliver’s mother was sitting on the porch. She didn’t have a book or a newspaper with her, nor any flowers to arrange; it seemed like she had been there merely waiting for our arrival. She got up as soon as she saw us and followed us inside.

“You haven’t been here in years, Oliver, there is no way you won’t make a mess in the kitchen unless I tell you where everything is.”

Her tone was tense, and I first put it down to having strangers take over her kitchen, but as she instructed us, I started to notice that her entire demeanor had changed since that morning. She would politely show me where they kept the cutting board and the knives for tomatoes, but her smile was limited to her mouth, as if her lips had been artificially arranged into a pleasant expression but the rest of her face hadn’t agreed.

As Oliver and I started slicing and grating, she stayed close by in the adjoining dining room, coming into the kitchen every now and then to see how the preparations were progressing. Was she keeping an eye on us, thinking we couldn’t manage the cooking? Or perhaps trying to find an opportunity to have a serious discussion with Oliver about Richard?

I wondered if something had happened between her and Richard while we were gone. Whispering, I asked if Oliver had noticed anything, but he didn’t share my concern.

“She has her moods every now and then. Last night she was in an exceptionally good mood. This is more business as usual,” he assured me, so I decided not to worry.

 

 

Oliver and my version of the pasta managed to resemble Mafalda’s original dish closely enough to garner praise, and Richard demanded to know the recipe. He was surprised to learn the simplicity of it, applauding the genius of Italians when it came to food.

At the end of the meal, Margaret cleared her throat.

“Oliver, Richard planned to fix the roof of the shed this afternoon. I thought you could maybe help him.” Before Oliver had time to protest, she continued: “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Elio and I will get out of your way. I can take him for a walk to the cove with the starfish.”

Oliver and I had tentatively planned for a sweet afternoon nap followed by a walk on the beach, but refusing his mother’s request for help was out of the question for Oliver, and so the afternoon plans were decided for all four of us.

 

 

I went upstairs with Oliver as he changed into his old yardwork clothes that Margaret had dug up for him. I sat on the edge of the bed, knowing this was neither the time or the place, but unable to stop my hand from reaching out and sliding down his bare stomach after his button-up had come off. If only I had known at our very beginning that the time would come when I was allowed to do that almost whenever I wanted.

Oliver pulled on a paint-splattered t-shirt and muttered, more to himself than to me:

“She set me up, and now I have to spend the afternoon tinkering on the roof with that stranger.”

He wasn’t looking for a response, but I commented anyway: “Maybe that was the point. Maybe she wants you to spend time with him, get to know each other. So that he wouldn’t be a stranger anymore.”

“And you,” he continued huffing as if he hadn’t heard a word I had said, “–you poor thing have to spend the afternoon with her. In fact, she stole my beach walk.”

I tried to assure him that I would get along with his mother just fine for one afternoon, even if she was in one of her moods, but Oliver didn’t listen.

“But I will make that up to you,” he said and pressed a kiss on my forehead before we descended downstairs.

 

 

Margaret’s plan had seemed obvious to me: to get her son to bond with Richard under the seemingly innocuous circumstances of a joint chore. However, after we had set on our walk, it started to dawn on me that I had misread the situation.

We had walked a long way away from the house, the fine sand of the beach getting into my espadrilles, when Margaret stopped.

Looking out to the steel blue ocean, she wrapped her long cardigan tighter around herself and asked: “Are you the reason why my son and Helen got divorced?”

Instead of Oliver, I was the one who had been lured into a trap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do you think she found out?
> 
> Thank you for reading. I hope you have a lovely week and the next chapter will be up again next Monday.


	3. Chapter 3

While I tried to decide how Oliver would have wanted me to answer his mother’s question, my silence already spoke volumes.

Margaret continued, her gaze still on the horizon as the shallow waves kept approaching our feet on the wet sand, breaking into foam before receding again.

“I didn’t see it at first, even though I couldn’t quite understand why he would bring his mentor’s child to our family place. Then I thought it was probably only fair, since he had been at your house for six weeks.” She paused as if she was still trying to work out the specifics in her mind. “But the way you fixed his breakfast this morning, cracked the egg for him. I told Richard it seemed like a very intimate gesture for a house guest. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t figured it out earlier.”

“One’s mind is capable of all kinds of somersaults when it needs to see something in a certain way,” I said simply.

She turned to look at me. “But you are the reason why he and Helen separated, aren’t you? He’s in love with you.”

“You really should talk to Oliver,” I said as gently as I could, hoping it wouldn’t sound petulant.

“I wanted to talk to you first.” Maybe she had thought it would be easier to get the truth out of a stranger than from someone who was used to hiding things from her. “Besides the obvious obstacles–,“ she shrugged as if I would instinctively know what she meant, “–you’re very young. I wonder if either of you know what you are doing.”

“I may be young, but I do care about him very deeply, Margaret. This isn’t a spur of the moment thing.”

I wanted to tell her that her son had been my sun and moon for five years now, even if he had been behind the clouds for four of them, but I wasn’t sure if Oliver would have appreciated me telling her the truth about how everything had started between us.

I desperately wished Oliver would have joined us for the walk, instead of helping Richard who, I now realized, probably would have fared just as well without Oliver’s help. I wondered if he had been in on Margaret’s plan.

“I am not entirely surprised,” Margaret continued. “There were times when he was in school, when I thought that… But then he married Helen, and things seemed to be fine. Until he told me this spring that they were separating.”

The swift wind caught in Margaret’s neatly combed hair and she huddled her cardigan closer to her body.

“I do wish he could’ve told me. When Oliver’s father was alive… I get that he never would’ve said anything to us then. Or when he was younger. His father would’ve sent him somewhere, for certain.”

I remembered what Oliver had told me once.

“And I did follow his father’s lead, maybe too much. So I guess it isn’t surprising if he doesn’t make any distinctions between me and his father even now,” Margaret added deep in thought, almost to herself.

“Is he happy?” she then asked me, mother’s concern reflecting through despite however she felt about the concept of Oliver and me.

I nodded. “I think so.”

“And you?”

“Very much so. So much that…” The breaking of my voice surprised me. I lowered my gaze on the sand. “So much that the fear of losing him is sometimes overwhelming.”

It was something that had occasionally reared its head in me ever since Vienna, but I didn’t know why I told that to her, of all people. I certainly hadn’t planned on it, but now that I had started, the rest of it flowed out, too. “It doesn’t feel real, for anyone to deserve so much happiness.”

I didn’t expect Margaret to comfort me, but I wasn’t prepared for the irony in her tone, either. “Oh, you are not the first one to think that in the history of the humankind. When you have everything to lose, the little voices start telling you that you don’t deserve it. Don’t make the same mistake I did; don’t start believing them.”

I looked up.

“I could have led a very different life, had I trusted my heart and not those voices.”

Margaret closed her eyes for a moment and then continued walking and with hesitating steps, I followed.

 

 

When we arrived at the cove, we found a group of terracotta-colored starfish, enough of them that we would with good conscience be able to report back to Oliver that Margaret had completed her mission of showing me some.

I took my shoes off and waded in the shallow water, toeing the smooth rocks, careful not to step on any of the starfish. I wondered if I would later be able to find this place again on my own, or with Oliver, to see if his child-like joy about the creatures would return.

Margaret stood near the waterline, watching me. “Oliver doesn’t know this, but Richard and I didn’t meet for the first time at the Eisenberg dinner. He and I knew each other, when we were young.”

I had sensed that we weren’t quite through with our earlier conversation about Oliver and me, so I was now surprised at Margaret’s introduction of a seemingly new topic. She sat down on a large rock and continued.

It had been one heady summer when Margaret and her parents, a well-off family from New England, had been vacationing in the Midwest. She had just turned eighteen and had met Richard by the lake where all the young people gathered in the evenings; there had been sunsets and secret nighttime kisses and, even if she didn’t say so directly, the excitement of wanting and being wanted so much it hurts.

But as all summers, that one had ended and then had come fall and college and Oliver’s father. She hadn’t seen Richard in almost forty years, until by sheer chance, he had shown up at that dinner last December. Their bodies had changed, and lives had been lived, but they had quickly found that their feelings had only been in hibernation, waiting to resurface.

I could have asked more practical questions. What had happened back then, had they tried to stay in touch. Still, the one that was on the top of my mind was born out of my own attempt at living a life away from someone after one heady summer. The memories of the longing and need I had felt for Oliver after he had been gone were tangible, and so I asked: “Had you missed him? Richard, I mean?”

Margaret looked at me and for the first time, despite the warm politeness of yesterday and through the tension of the early afternoon today, we now seemed to understand each other on the level of a shared human experience, not merely as a twenty-two-year-old boy and a fifty-something woman.

“Yes,” she said simply, and her features softened in a way I hadn’t yet seen. “I can’t believe we found each other again. And he brought back so much more than my youth. He’s a great man. One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Oliver’s father could sometimes be a very small man.”

From everything I had heard from Oliver and deduced between the lines, I had no reason to disagree.

“You know, Richard saw nothing wrong with this whole…thing between you and Oliver,” Margaret admitted. “I wish I could tell you I feel the same, I really do. You seem very nice, but I will need time to think about this.”

“That’s okay.“ It would have to be; we didn’t have any choice, did we?

Then something occurred to me. “Can I tell Oliver we’ve talked?”

She nodded. “I want to talk to him, too, but it’s difficult. Neither of us is used to it. Richard is trying to teach me that, too,” she added smiling ruefully.

I thought of my and Oliver’s conversations about literature, music, and philosophy – all easy from the start and in notable contrast to the wall of silence when it had come to discussing things that mattered. I realized now that for him, more may have contributed to it than just the forbiddenness of our feelings.

“Can I ask you something? Why didn’t you and Richard stay in touch?”

“My parents got involved. His background was different from mine, and I was young and impressionable. Too proud to admit that I might find a soulmate in someone who didn’t have the finest educations, let alone to fight for him.”

It’s a shame that the fates of first loves are often guided by the inexperience of the lovers, I thought.

“He didn’t try to find you later?”

“He married a piano teacher and by what he’s told me, I’ve gathered that he led a happy life with her. Very few people end up with their first love, but I do think occasionally whether she got to live a life that could have been mine, and I got handed something else instead.”

The cool ocean water kept crashing at my ankles, obscuring my view to the rocks and the starfish at the bottom one wave at a time, before the water would clear out once again.

“I don’t think I was Oliver’s first love,” I said quietly.

He had been my first, but I had never expected myself to be his. He had told me that after meeting me, there had suddenly been a before and an after to his life, but maybe I was being calibrated against something I had no idea of.

“Which is why he probably knows now what he has.” Margaret’s eyes were sincere. “Look, Helen is a dear family friend and she is, or was, a great daughter-in-law. But I can’t deny that these past two days I’ve seen a certain peace in my son that I’ve never seen before.”

“Thank you, Margaret.”

I didn’t know what else to say. The conversation had ostensibly been about her life and her regrets, but maybe underneath all that, she had tried to convey her understanding. That she realized that inadvertently, she had almost been the cause of her son falling into the same fate, life thrown onto a wrong course because of the wishes of his family.

I was happy that Oliver had been stronger than his mother. Even if we had to stay hidden for a lot of the time, at least we were together.

I wanted to offer Margaret a hug, or at least a hand to help her up from the rock, but despite our talk, I wasn’t sure that she and I were quite there yet. If she wasn’t affectionate with her son, she would hardly appreciate my attempts at being so. While I pondered this, Margaret briskly got up from the rock herself and suggested that we start heading back to the cottage.

 

 

We walked in silence for a long stretch. Maybe there would come a day when she would see me as a normal and indistinguishable part of her son’s life, and by extension, her life, even if the day wasn’t today. The moment at the cove had at least been a start.

When we neared the cottage, our conversation started up again, but it trickled back to menial things, such as the state of the neighbors’ fences or their lack of upkeep of their gardens, or the weather for the next day when she and Richard were supposed to drive back home to Connecticut.

 

 

The roof of the shed had been fixed when we returned, and we found Richard and Oliver sitting in lawn chairs, with beers in hand as rewards for their job well done. They shared jokes and I hoped that it meant that the ice had started to melt between them, too. Based on my and Margaret’s conversation, it didn’t sound like Richard would be going anywhere anytime soon.

Their good mood, however, came to an end when I walked over to Oliver and laid a hand on his shoulder. I happily started to tell him that his mother and I had, indeed, found the starfish. Oliver shifted instinctively.

Margaret noticed her son trying to move away from my touch. “It’s fine, Oliver, I know.”

Oliver knew immediately what she meant.

“What? Did you–“ Oliver’s eyes flitted from me to his mother, and his features froze before they retreated into a young boy’s face looking fearfully at his mother. “Mother, I wanted to tell you, but...”

Margaret’s arms were wrapped around herself again and she only nodded at her son.

“It will be okay, Oliver. I just need a bit of time.” Then, a change of subject as if she was putting aside a tricky needlework that she would need to come back to later with more energy: “Now, who wants coffee?”

Without waiting for an answer, she ascended the stairs to the porch and disappeared inside, Richard trailing after her with a pleading: “Maggie?”

 

 

I now understood what Oliver had meant when he had said that her mother was highly proficient in brushing any unpleasant topics under the rug and out of the view.

On the surface, the evening resembled the previous night. Richard made us a dinner just as delicious, and a bottle of wine was opened just as the night before. We all pretended to be on a good mood for the sake of Richard and Margaret’s final evening at the cottage, but I couldn’t help but feel the veil of tension that now hung over the room.

Between the dinner preparations, I had managed to find a quick moment alone with Oliver. Normally, I would have wanted to ask how his and Richard’s afternoon had gone, but all that was now overshadowed by the fact that his mother knew about us. I told Oliver that I hadn’t been the one to tell her, that she had found out on her own. I also wanted to make sure he wasn’t cross with me, and he said that he wasn’t.

Still, he was distraught. His mother now knew the secret he had kept so long, but he hadn’t been in control of the reveal and he didn’t quite know how to handle it. What exactly did she know? How had she taken it? He would have to talk to her himself, but he had no idea how to start, especially now that she was determined to dismiss the topic entirely.

During the dinner, I could see Oliver repeatedly get lost in his thoughts, and under the gossamer of questions unspoken between the mother and son, we all retired to bed early.

 

 

Whether at night or for a nap, my favorite thing about going to bed with Oliver was sliding my feet under the soft sheets and letting them find his. The skin cool from a night swim or warm from the afternoon sun, soft skin made softer by the dusting of hair. I would leisurely rub his calf with the ball of my foot, before settling my thigh between his as I gauged his enthusiasm or, alternatively, tiredness; whether he would do something to me, whether he would allow me to pleasure him. Whether it would be one of those nights where neither would rest until the other lay limp, sated.

Tonight, I would’ve wanted to offer him solace, to take his mind off of things, but I knew Oliver was not in the mood and his response didn’t come as a surprise.

_No, Elio, not until they leave_.

He pulled me to his chest, simply hugging me instead and I let him be and prepared for sleep with my head on his shoulder.

I slipped my hand under his shirt and caressed his chest, wishing I could have eased his anguished heart underneath, but I could only do so much. Ultimately, this would have to be resolved between him and his mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and all your great comments. 
> 
> In the next chapter, it's Sunday and time for Margaret and Richard to leave back home. Will Oliver and his mother talk before she leaves? What happens when the boys get the house to themselves? Chapter 4 will be up next Monday.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning, I woke up alone.

I patted around the bed sleepily, finding nothing but flat, crumpled sheets and I opened my eyes to realize the bed was empty. Oliver was gone. It wasn’t even close to a breakfast time yet, so he couldn’t have gone downstairs. Had he gone to the other guest room?

I sat up in the bed and considered whether I should go and check, when I noticed a familiar white shape sitting on the beach in the distance, near the waterline.

Craning my neck, I kept an eye on him from the window as I pulled on my shorts and the nearest sweater. I padded quietly downstairs, slipped on my espadrilles by the porch and headed down to the beach.

 

 

The sun had come out a little while earlier, but the light was still that of the morning, the softest merengue yellow. Mist hung over the water and the beach was empty and quiet save for the waves crashing to the waterline.

Oliver sat on the sand, huddled in his creamy white fisherman’s sweater and looking like the only person left in the world. That world would have been enough for me.

I kneeled on the sand behind him, draping my body over his back, leaning in with all of my weight.

“Are you doing it again?” I asked quietly, slipped my arms around his neck and hid my nose in his hair. “Thinking by the ocean?”

“Thinking of you,” he said and placed a kiss to the inside of my arm. “Except now also my mother.”

“I wouldn’t have seen that coming,” I attempted a joke and moved to sit next to him.

Oliver smiled sadly. “I need to talk to her today, before they leave. It’s not enough that she knows, I want her to understand that this isn’t a phase or a reaction to my divorce. You’re here to stay.”

I rested my head on his shoulder. “I’m sure she’ll come around. She just needs time.”

“She’s going to be too proud to ever tell our friends, or her acquaintances,” he predicted bitterly. “I will become a half-son that she needs to keep hidden. And she will be polite enough to you, but fully inviting you into her life as a family member? I don’t know if she’ll ever be capable of that.”

I had known that it meant a lot to Oliver, as it did to any child, to have his mother accept his choices in life, but only now did I realize that it was equally important for him to get her to accept me as a part of it.

 

 

At breakfast, Margaret avoided the unresolved issues by making a fuss about the chores she still needed to complete at the cottage before she and Richard could leave home.

I gave Oliver‘s hand an encouraging squeeze under the table, when he asked his mother whether she would, nevertheless, have time to take a little walk with him. Richard quickly offered to take care of half of the items on Margaret’s to do list, including lunch.

She didn’t look as relieved by the offer as one might have assumed but agreed.

 

 

Richard and I sat on the porch, reading, when Oliver and his mother took off on their walk. When they were out of earshot, Richard lifted his eyes from his newspaper and said, pondering: “They are going to talk, right?”

“I hope so. It can be hard for Oliver sometimes.”

“For Maggie, too.”

He smiled at me amiably. “You must be looking forward to having time alone with him after we leave. And it’ll be nice for the two of you to be able to stop sneaking around at night.”

My grin was sheepish. Had we been that obvious?

“I have been young once, you know,” he said and adjusted his reading glasses, returning to his news article.

I thought of all theyears it had taken him and Margaret to get to this point, from the youth of eighteen to their wiser fifties, and my and Oliver’s four weeks of seemingly wasted time suddenly were nothing in comparison. Or even those four years after he had left Crema.

But those decades and the gathered life experience had made Margaret appreciative of Richard and ready for him; I wondered if I was even now fully ready for Oliver, or he for me?

I liked to think so.

I liked to think that now that we knew how miserable life was without the other, and how much the other’s presence alleviated the aches that the world inevitably thrusts on a person, we would do whatever it took to hold on to that soothing balm. And that if and when there would be growing pains, we would endure them together.

 

 

When Oliver and his mother returned, the day had already fallen to the side of afternoon, I had reached the final chapter of my book, and Richard’s chicken was golden and crispy in the oven.

I tried to gauge Oliver’s reactions when they arrived at the porch, but both his and his mother’s expressions were unreadable. Yet, Margaret’s eye makeup was smudged at the edges and the wrinkles on Oliver’s temples looked calmer, smoother than in a little while. He smiled at me and gently squeezed my thigh when we sat down at the table for lunch, but I wasn’t sure if I would ever hear anything about the conversations that had hopefully taken place.

 

 

When the chicken had been devoured and Margaret and Richard were all packed up and ready to leave home, we gathered outside by their car to say goodbye.

“So, what plans do you have for Labor Day?” Margaret asked as Richard closed the trunk.

Oliver did a mental calculation of the weeks ahead. “We are probably already in Milan on the first weekend of September.”

“Ah, yes, for your exchange program.”

“But maybe…” Oliver turned to me.

I nodded and took over. “I’m sure my parents would be very happy to meet you, if you two are in the mood for travel. You are welcome to visit any time.”

Richard wrapped his arm around Margaret’s waist encouragingly and they exchanged a look.

“That might be very nice. Thank you. But are you sure your parents wouldn’t mind?” she asked.

“We all would be glad to have you and Richard there, Margaret,” I assured her.

She paused for a moment and then reached over to lightly touch my cheek with her hand. “Please. Maggie. That’s what my family calls me.”

I understood the significance of her gesture; both what it meant from her and what it meant to Oliver, who watched us and then, without a word, took a step forward to embrace his mother tightly.

They both had tears in their eyes as Margaret’s face pressed against Oliver’s cheek and Richard also found something in his eye that required clumsy wiping with the pad of his thumb.  

“Okay, now, stop everyone, this is supposed to be a happy plan,” Margaret said in the end, wiping her eyes, letting go of her son and returning to Richard’s approving arms for a moment before he led her to their car.

Oliver and I stood on the porch, waving, as they started driving back to Connecticut and even before they had fully disappeared out of sight, Oliver turned to me and kissed me with everything he had. After, he held my face close.

“Thank you.”

I was pleased but confused. “For what?”

“Just thank you.”

 

 

That night the house was going to be all ours, as Oliver kept reminding me every chance he got.

He was giddy, which surely was partly due to the weight that had been lifted from his shoulders after his talk with his mother, but also because we finally had all the privacy we wanted.

It escalated to the point of us not being able to wait until we were ready for bed. Instead, Oliver started to undress me as soon as we were done with dinner and I began to clean up. This time, the dinner had been nowhere as lavish as what Richard had provided the past two evenings, because now the food’s only purpose was to sustain us while we could finally focus all our attention on each other.

“Not in your mother’s kitchen, Oliver,” I laughed after he had managed to pull down my shorts.

“And what room would be good enough for you?” he asked, picking me up.

“Does it have to be a room?”

He stopped in the hallway mid-step, my arms still around his neck. “What do you mean?”

I played with the collar of his t-shirt. “It’s already dark but it’s still warm outside, isn’t it? Down by the beach?”

“For a little while longer, yes. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I’m always saying what you think I’m saying. Haven’t you learned that by now?”

 

 

We took a blanket with us and I put my shorts back on, just in case, before we headed down the stairs to the dunes. Oliver found a place with just enough shrubbery to protect us from the odd beachgoer, should some unexpecting soul stroll by on their evening walk.

“If only I’d known this when I played ball here with my friends as a teen,” Oliver mused as I lay down on the blanket and he hovered over me, filling my mouth with uninhibited kisses.

Between them, I managed: “What would you have done differently?”

“Probably nothing. After all, everything led me to you. And right…here.”

He lifted my shirt and covered my stomach with hungry caresses, starting from the spot where the hard planes of my chest softened into the pillowy curve of my belly. It was one of his newest favorite places on me and he would nuzzle his face there until my skin would burn red from his stubble.

I wriggled to help him take off my shorts again and when I tipped my head back, the night sky was filled with a million and one stars. The majestic view was in such a deep contrast with the obscenely wet sounds Oliver’s mouth started making along and around my cock in the silent night that I had to let out a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

I started to explain but didn’t get far, as Oliver, in turn, started doing the thing I liked with his tongue, and I lost all ability to think about anything else. Soon, the only thought that existed was his warm, wet, insisting mouth and the wide of his tongue, the tip of his tongue and then my release covering them all.

 

 

We laid on the beach for a while, me on the ruined blanket and Oliver on the sand next to me, both of us sweaty from the warm night and our earlier exertion, until he suggested we move back to the house.

I liked looking at the infinity of the universe with my personal infinity lying by my side, so I complained that I wasn’t able to move yet. To prove me wrong, Oliver went right for the spot between my ribs that always made me instantly squeal and curl up like a hedgehog.

“I think you can move just fine,” he teased, adding a few more squeezes for good measure until I laughed and begged him to stop and promised I would get up.

I jumped on his back when we walked back towards the cottage. “You just wanted to get back inside so that it would be your turn!”

He reached behind him to hook his arms under the backs of my knees to hold me up. “And is it going to be?”

“Of course. You will get my undivided attention from now on, for the entire week.” I kissed his hair and got sand in my mouth, he hadn’t gotten all of it out from earlier.

“Or until Saturday at least,” he corrected.

“What’s Saturday?”

Oliver explained that his colleague was having a bonfire party at his place further down the beach, and we were invited. Several people from their department had summer houses in the area and would probably show up, too.

I made enough of approving sounds to make Oliver think I was listening to him, but I mainly kept kissing his sand-free ear while he balanced between carrying the blanket, preventing me from falling off of his back, and finally opening the door.

 

 

He didn’t lower me down until we were in his bedroom, now officially our room.

We hadn’t been able to be freely together for several days, but now we finally didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing or hearing us, and so the mix of anticipation and impatience was almost too much to handle.

I fell on the bed, sitting up to watch Oliver start to undress himself: he favored speed over elegance as he clumsily got rid of his shirt, then shoes, a carelessly thrown sneaker accidentally hitting the side table and causing one of his mother’s porcelain trinkets to come crashing down. He barely gave the mess on the floor a second thought as his palms rushed to enclose my face and he leaned down to kiss me.

Despite our prelude at the beach, I had missed his body, all of it, so when his lips freed mine, I latched my mouth onto the vast of his skin that was being offered to me. I started by a kiss on his bare hip, and then kept going neatly along the warm skin just above the waistband of his shorts, like a child obediently coloring inside the lines even though the fun often started when you got outside them.

“Elio,” he exhaled when my licks reached the hair below his navel.

His eyes locked to mine, I switched from licking to having my hand reach up inside the leg of his shorts. His thigh was full against my squeezing palm and just once he was wearing shorts that gave me enough space to maneuver in them as I wished. He had been half-hard ever since he had sucked me off on the beach and it only took a few strokes to get him to the point where the black of his eyes signified that we were done playing.

“Take your clothes off,” he said hoarsely as he pulled away from me enough to yank down his shorts. I got up and started hastily undoing mine but stopped when I saw the fallen trinket in the corner, a starfish figurine shattered into pieces.

“Oliver, do you think that was important to your mother?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver said. “Now get back to taking those clothes off.”

I was still distracted. “Maybe we should try to fix it. Glue it back together.”

“It’s fine,” Oliver said, now preoccupied with the zipper of my shorts as he had decided he would need to take matters into his own hands if we were to get anything done.

“Should we reimburse her?” I lifted one foot and then the other as Oliver kneeled at my feet, sliding the shorts off of me. “She just started liking me, I don’t want to fall out of her good graces.”

“Would you forget about the figurine, you goose? You weren’t even the one who broke it.”

He laughed and tugged my underwear down and I grinned at his eagerness.

Dragging my fingers gently through his hair while he was still at my feet, I asked: “Did you know that a group of starfish is called a galaxy?”

“Yes, yes,” he hummed and commanded, now standing up in front of me: “Arms up.”

I gave him a quick kiss first to pay for his services and then did as I was told, and he pulled off my t-shirt, relieving me of my last item of clothing.

His arms wrapped all the way around my waist and his breath in my ear, he asked: “Now, are we done with the starfish business, because I had quite different plans in mind for the rest of the night?”

My nose buried in his neck, I kissed a trail of yeses onto his throat.

 

 

It was heavenly to have the familiar weight of his body against mine again. I liked feeling safe from the world, between the soft bed and him. He pressed a feathering kiss on my lips and I parted them for him hungry as a newly-born bird; I would have let him kiss and savor my mouth alone for hours, but his hot breath traveling down my neck was an intoxicating second choice. As was the wet path forming from my throat down to my chest, then past my chest, then past my navel. By the time his tongue reached my cock, I was easily hard again.

He gave it one languid suck and reached up again to kiss me, and I could still taste the salt on his tongue.

My poor brain was in the middle of trying to think of a solution to the paradox of wanting to keep kissing him but also wanting his lips on my cock, when Oliver retreated to the foot of the bed and broke the paradox for me.

My thighs now parted, he started by merely circling me with his tongue, but the moment he slipped the tip inside, I yelped. Only because I knew how quickly this could end if he kept going, and I yearned for the connection of having all of him inside me and was scared that he would make me come before we would get to that.

Clutching the sheets, I told him so, but between his licks, he only uttered: “Soon.”

“It’s been days, can’t be soon enough,” I managed to pant when he gave me a break and used his mouth to caress my inner thigh, instead.

“Aren’t we impatient today,” he teased as he came back up to the top of the bed and pulled on my bottom lip leisurely with his teeth before tilting my chin and tasting my wide-open mouth with his.

His heavy cock rubbed against my stomach and I reached down blindly to wrap my hand around it and stroked it with my thumb, causing him to grunt and contort in pleasure.

“I want this. You,” I reminded him.

 

 

Up until then he had been eager, almost frantic, maybe to make up for the lost time of the weekend, but when he positioned himself between my legs and entered me, he suddenly slowed down. It was as if he wanted to feel every hundredth of an inch when he slid into me.

“I missed all of you too,” he gasped as an explanation.

As much as we would have wanted to savor the reunion of our bodies, it was impossible for either of us to hold off for too long, and Oliver sank his forehead against my temple and his teeth in my neck as he came and soon came I, too, for the second time that night.

 

 

When Oliver lay next to me again and turned his head to kiss me, he aimed for my lips but sloppily landed on the corner of my mouth. I caressed his jaw and whispered mid-kiss: “These are your mother’s sheets. We’d better do something about them before it is too late.”

“We have plenty of time to wash them before we leave. We have all week,” Oliver reminded me.

All week, what a lovely thought that was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and all your lovely comments. 
> 
> Next chapter next Monday! In the meantime, I’m on vacation with sporadic internet access, so my responses to any comments may come later than usual but I will get back to all of them ❤️


	5. Chapter 5

Oliver had mentioned the party invitation on Sunday night while we were dragging ourselves back to the house from the beach with the ruined blanket, but I had only half-listened, and rather been planning how things would unfold once we would get upstairs.

Our week had since filled up with morning walks on the beach followed by leisurely breakfasts, afternoon naps interspersed with kissing and reading, and long nights of languid love-making. Night swims if the tides allowed, and without exception they led to more bodily pleasures when we got back to the house. He would crowd me against the wall as soon as we were inside, and I, all wet from the swim, would try not to stumble against his mother’s paintings that hung in the entranceway. Head taller than me, he would hover over me and merely look at me as every breath rising in my chest was steeped in the desire that would soon find its release when I would race him upstairs.

The endless joys of playing together made the days feel almost as if we had been back in Crema, or rather in Bergamo, where we had had no one to answer to and where our only task had been to enjoy each other.

Back then, there had been a ticking time bomb looming over us, counting down the hours we had together, and it had tinged everything with a bittersweet urgency. Now, when we were looking at the rest of our lives together instead, we had the luxury of savoring every moment and there were times when the euphoria was almost overwhelming. Those moments were also the ones where the fear of losing it all checked in with me, no matter how much I tried to keep it at bay.

Most of our time together was disgustingly happy, however, and so when Saturday morning rolled around, I had forgotten all talk of any invitations and asked Oliver what he meant by needing to get something to bring to the party.

“That bonfire party at Teller’s. My colleague. I told you he hosts a party at his beach house every summer, invites all the neighbors and people from the department who have summer places on the Cape.”

We were standing on the porch, holding our mugs of steaming coffee and looking out to the water.

“When is it?” I asked.

“Tonight. Have you been listening to anything I’ve told you?”

“My memory is selective. I can be very attentive if I want to,” I said and wrapped my free hand around his waist from the back, pressing a kiss on his bare shoulder blade and adding a quick scrape of my teeth. “So we are going there?”

“If you want. I would like to at least make an appearance. Keeps things docile at work.”

“What kind of a party is it?”

“Teller and Joe like to pretend it’s a civilized garden party and that’s how it starts out, but everyone stays till late hours when the bonfire is lit and the wine really starts flowing. I haven’t been in a few years.”

“Joe?”

“Teller’s partner of, oh, I don’t know how many years. But I’ve only met Joe here on the Cape. Teller never brings him to events back home. Only the people here know about his personal life.”

“And yours?” I asked gingerly.

The apologetic look that returned to Oliver’s face was already familiar to me from the past weekend, when his mother was here. “No one knows. About me. So.”

“Got it. I will have to kiss you extra hard before we leave to hold me over, then.”

I made light of it to silence the little sting that came from the hope dying. Once again, I would be introduced as nothing more than his friend.

While our history was longer than the few months that we had now been together, our relationship felt fragile at times. Not because I would have doubted his feelings for me but because of how invisible it was outside the four walls of his apartment or the cottage or wherever we happened to be. I had mentioned my fear of losing him to his mother on our walk, and the need to stay in hiding didn’t particularly ease that fear.

 

 

Even if they wouldn’t come to know the whole truth about who I was, I was still slightly nervous to intentionally meet people from Oliver’s circles for the first time.

I decided against shorts and wore my summer slacks, instead. Maybe they would make me look more grown-up. I brought all my shirts down to the living room of the cottage and modeled them, trying to get advice from Oliver who was reading on the couch. He humored me by absent-mindedly watching my efforts, even though he had quickly made clear that he didn’t care what I wore, and that no one else would either.

“It’s an eclectic group, you’ll blend in no matter what you wear. And you know I actually prefer you like this.” He pulled me to his lap when I was in-between shirts and started kissing my earlobe.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed against him, happy about the interruption and the chance to forget about the upcoming evening for a moment.

I lay in his embrace, content, as Oliver’s hands grazed the skin on my back. He showered my neck with gentle bites and kisses and ran his lips along my collarbone, but despite my body already being bare from the waist up, he wouldn’t go any lower.

As always, I had grown hard in his lap, my cock grinding against his firm stomach through the fabrics of our clothing. Worried I would soon ruin my slacks if this went on much longer, I finally whined: “Stop teasing. You can do more.”

He stopped and lifted my chin.

“We don’t have time. Save it for later,” he smirked as he got up, gently moving me from his lap to the couch, and left to go and change his own clothes for the evening.

“Not fair,” I muttered as I lay on the couch, sulking, until I gave up and put on the button-up I had deemed at least half acceptable for the occasion.

 

 

When we arrived at Teller’s house, we were far from the first guests there.

We had barely left our bikes by the gate when we met a lively woman who was eating a hot dog in a bun that was bursting with fillings. She swallowed the last bites of her food quickly and seemed genuinely delighted to see us.

“Oliver! They didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“This is Evelyn, the department secretary. Elio is a friend visiting from Italy.”

“Wonderful, nice to meet you, Elio.”

She wiped her hand carelessly on her light-colored slacks before shaking my hand and kissing Oliver’s cheek.

We were soon joined by others wanting to say hello; they asked Oliver what he had been doing this summer, and he told about his summer classes.

“You poor thing for getting stuck with those, we have been out here for weeks already,” an older woman said. “I do not miss coming back to the city and the heat.”

“It really has been stifling this year.”

Rowdy laughter carried from behind us then, and it belonged to our host, a charming older gentleman with grey slicks on his temples.

“Hello, I’m Teller, welcome,” he told me pleasantly and shook my hand. “And this is Joe.”

Teller wrapped his arm around the shoulders of a man who was holding a small tray with two drinks. Joe nodded to me and Oliver. “Welcome. These are for you.”

“Thank you. And this is for you,” Oliver handed Teller the bottle of wine we had picked up from the village earlier in the day.

Teller inspected the bottle, nodding approvingly.

“Elio here chose it, in fact,” Oliver added.

I admitted half of the decision having come from the fact that it boasted a line from a Shelley poem on its label.

“Really? Are you a Shelley enthusiast?”

Oliver laughed. “Oh, is he? Now you’ve opened a veritable Pandora’s box, Teller.”

“That’s quite something for a young man. That calls for a toast,” Teller said and we clinked our cocktail tumblers with his before he continued: “Where did you find him, Oliver? He isn’t a student, is he?”

”In the middle of the Italian countryside, of all places. He’s Professor Perlman’s son, from Crema. We became friends and he’s now visiting me.”

“Really? From when you went to do your summer residence?”

“Yes. I went there to finish my manuscript but got lessons on much more from this one, including the style of Busoni and the death of Shelley.”

“A young man with many talents, even better.”

Teller and I compared notes of how our obsessions with Percy Shelley had begun and the conversation ended with him offering me to show his collection.

“I even have one of his first editions. Come, I’ll show you.”

I tried to see if Oliver wanted to join us, but he was already stuck talking to Evelyn and only gave me an apologetic shrug _._

After the week of having been able to spend every moment with him, I didn’t like leaving him behind now. Then again, our agreement was that no one could find out that we were together, and thus I would have to navigate the party without being glued to his side the entire time.

Teller led me to a small library room at the back of the house, and I was appropriately impressed. It wasn’t as large as my father’s but having a collection like that at a summer cottage? Astounding.

He let me hold and leaf the books and I was so immersed in them that it took a while for me to notice that he was observing me.

“I’m know that I’m an open secret at the department, but he’s been a complete secret,” he started.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oliver. You’re not just his friend, are you.”

“I think you have the wrong idea.” It pained me to deny the truth, but since Oliver had insisted on sticking to that story, I didn’t want to get him in any trouble.

Teller smiled gently at my apprehension. “It’s fine, we don’t have to talk about it. But I saw how he looked at you. I’ve never seen him look at anyone like that.”

My curiosity and vanity got the best of me. I closed the book I was holding and gave it back to him.

“Like what?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Do you know the Star of Africa?”

“No.”

“It’s the largest diamond in the world. Oliver looks like it’s been given to him for safe-keeping and it both dazzles him and makes him worried that he’s going to lose it.”

I bit my lip. “Do the others know, too?”

“I don’t think so. He tries his best to act casual, but I’ve known him too long for it to work on me.”

 

 

Oliver found Teller and me upon our return to the garden.

“Must have been an interesting collection,” he commented dryly with a fresh drink in his hand, when Teller left us to go and welcome his next guests.

”What’s wrong?”

“You were gone quite a while.”

“He had a lot of rare editions.”

His tone was sarcastic. “I’m sure.”

Was Oliver mad at me?

“You’re the one who wanted to come here,” I reminded him.

Oliver looked around us and lowered his voice. “To maintain friendly work relationships, not to have him hit on you.”

Teller had acted nothing but fatherly towards me, so Oliver’s implication sounded ludicrous and I decided I needed a second drink, too, to make sense of this. I walked over to the drinks table, filled up my glass and drank half of if right there before returning to Oliver.

“What’s really going on?” I asked him.

“You did seem quite taken with his compliments.”

“I was just being polite. Besides, he knows.” I emphasized the last word.

“He knows?” Oliver repeated, as if hoping that the words would make more sense if he said them himself.

“About us.”

He tensed up. “Us? How?”

“Don’t worry, he isn’t going to tell anyone.”

“I’ll… I’ll have to talk to him. At some point. Was he upset?”

“Upset?”

“Aggravated. That I hadn’t told him. I’ve known him a long time.”

“Not particularly,” I shrugged. If anything, Teller had seemed happy for Oliver.

We were interrupted by a couple insisting that Oliver solve an argument between them regarding a Heraclitus teaching. I left them alone and after having now downed two drinks in a quick succession, went to look for a bathroom inside.

I tried a wrong door at first, startling a couple that had escaped the crowds in the backyard and was passionately embracing in a small reading room. I didn’t know either of them, so I apologized quickly and closed the door. Luckily the next one I tried was the correct door, but it did make me think whether that was why Oliver had acted so suspicious after Teller and I had been absent longer than he had expected.

  


I was about to join the others in the garden again, when Teller’s partner Joe caught me at the terrace door, carrying a tray of yet another round of drinks. Clearly one didn’t need to go thirsty for long at this party.

I grabbed one to be polite and as I took a sip from it, I noticed Oliver standing in the yard next to the swings, talking to a young man whom I hadn’t seen at the party earlier. The boy had his back to me; blond hair, slight build. Evelyn and another woman were standing with them, too, but Oliver and the boy seemed to be mostly talking to each other.

I didn’t think much of it until the boy touched Oliver’s arm lightly and turned around, laughing and I was able to take a look at his face.

I didn’t even know him, and yet, my stomach dropped.

There was the awe on his face, the worship, the drinking in of Oliver’s every word. I felt sick as I recognized it all.

It was the very same look that had belonged to me through the summer when Oliver had come to stay with us.

“Who’s that?” I asked Joe and pointed at the boy, both wanting and not wanting to know.

“That’s Leonard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More next Monday again :)


	6. Chapter 6

The same adoration for Oliver that had decorated my face for those six weeks at the villa was now here on the face of this boy called Leonard, in plain sight for me and everyone else to see.

I lost interest in my drink and sat down on the steps leading to the terrace to observe them. People kept going past me to the terrace and back and I was probably in their way, but I didn’t care.

They clearly knew each other, Oliver and the boy, and Oliver seemed friendly with him. The boy tilted his head and kept looking up at Oliver, hanging onto his every reaction and syllable, even when Oliver was briefly talking to someone else. I watched them from the distance until it became unbearable and I forced myself to walk over.

“Hello.”

“Elio.” I watched Oliver closely, but he didn’t look startled or guilty or in any way different from the way he had carried himself here since we arrived. “These are some of our students; Leonard, and his sister Laura.”

Laura shook my hand, Leonard just raised his glass as a greeting. He looked at me warily from head to toe.

If I had ever wanted Oliver to wrap his arm around me to show that I was his, this was the moment. A devilish voice in my head suggested casually kissing him on the mouth in front of everyone, in front of Leonard, but of course I didn’t.

My mind raced but I managed to chat pleasantly. _Yes, lovely town, yes, my first time here._

I lit up a cigarette that Leonard’s sister offered to me but kept watching him and Oliver.

After I had been introduced as Oliver’s old friend, Leonard had dismissed me as a potential threat and had returned to his flirting that seemed blatant to me. Did the others not notice?

If he acted that way in public, I didn’t want to even think what it was like at Oliver’s office hours when they were alone. Was he coming by every week, with barely disguised matters that he supposedly needed help with? Was he sitting in a carefully considered pose on the visitors’ couch, or leaning a little too far across Oliver’s desk? Was he trying to seduce him in an office lined with shelves full of folders and theses?

And why had none of this ever come up? Oliver had never mentioned him, even though he sometimes spoke of his classes or students to me.

 

 

“I need a refill,” Oliver announced, looking at the bottom of his empty glass. “Anyone else?”

Evelyn requested a beer, but the others were still working on their current drinks. I followed Oliver inside.

I chose a cold beer for myself and took one from the bucket also for Evelyn as promised.

“How many times have you fucked him?” I asked Oliver with a measured delivery of my words. I knew I was being crude.

“Who?” Oliver asked, distracted and holding an almost empty bottle of gin at eye level, gauging whether there was still enough left for him to fix himself a drink.

“Leonard.”

“What? Zero.”

“Come on. He’s gorgeous. And you must have noticed how he looks at you.”

“Elio.” Oliver placed down the bottle of gin, lowered his voice. “I know you thought I slept my way through half of Crema, but you should know better by now where my interests lie. Besides, whether or not you existed, he’s not my type. And he’s a student.”

I wasn’t completely satisfied with his answer. I considered whether it would have been preferable that Leonard would have been Oliver’s type, but that I was the sole reason he wasn’t going to ravage him.

Before I could decide, Evelyn found us. She had come to see what was taking so long with her beer and, enthusiastically, she also informed us that a game of volleyball was being set up on the beach. Oliver didn’t need to be asked twice, and Evelyn convinced me to take part as well.

Oliver placed a placating kiss on my fingertips behind Evelyn’s back when we went back outside. For him, our issue had perhaps been dealt with, but as for me, I wasn’t so sure.

 

 

On the beach, the volleyball net was well on its way being erected, and Evelyn took it upon herself to randomly assign the teams. Oliver and I landed on opposite sides, but Leonard was on Oliver’s team and very pleased about it.

I seethed when he took his shirt off for the game and asked Oliver to check something on his tanned back. Oliver gave the spot Leonard was pointing at a cursory check and seemed to nod that there was nothing of concern, that Leonard was good to go. I was glad that despite the warmth of the evening sun, Oliver kept his own shirt on.

 

 

My team consisted of me, Evelyn, and four of Teller’s neighbors, and it quickly became clear that we were the underdogs. Evelyn’s talent fell on the recruitment and set-up side of the game, and none of the other four members of our team were very accomplished in volleyball either. Several people on the opposing team, on the other hand, were quite skilled, even though none of them really compared to Oliver.

His team racked up points quickly, our team just managing to win one on my serve.

Beyond that, I wasn’t much of a help to my team as I was mostly distracted and noted with simmering frustration how Leonard sought Oliver’s approval every time he managed a promising serve.

I wondered if the situation had been the same, had Oliver and I been openly together.

Would Leonard have tried to impress him as persistently, regardless? Would he have paid any heed to the fact that the object of his affection was already someone else’s? I didn’t know his character and right now, I didn’t particularly want to, either.

This was surprising, as I had a habit of being nice to, or even befriending, anyone I saw as a potential competitor.

Up until now, however, those people had always been women, and I was lost as to how I should handle this sudden appearance of someone younger than me, bolder than me, but with the same shape of yearning for Oliver.

 

 

Our team managed to get a couple of more points by sheer luck, but in the end, Oliver and his teammates won the match by a large margin.

They celebrated with hoots and hollers, high fives. Oliver placed his hand on Leonard’s bare shoulder, patted him encouragingly. He did this to all his team members, but I didn’t care about the others.

His thumb didn’t sink into Leonard’s skin, he didn’t try to massage his shoulder as he had done with me five summers ago, and yet, a rush of nausea turned my insides.

I congratulated our opponents along with the rest of my team.

“Good game,” I managed in repeat, lips tight, as I shook their hands. “Good game.”

In that moment, I wished the game would have continued for one more point so that I could have aimed the ball at Leonard’s gleeful head, wiping that smile off of his face.

I also started thinking what the real reason was why Oliver had wanted to come to this party so adamantly.

Did he enjoy the adoration?

Why, of course he must have, he was only human. But was mine not enough? I hardly could show any admiration towards him here for it would appear suspicious. Despite our practice in stealth, I was not sure I could have calibrated my affection appropriately. It was either locked up out of the view or it spilled over, and we could not risk having the latter happen here.

 

 

Evelyn engaged me in a conversation as we took down the volleyball net and I tried to forget the familiar sight of the touch between Oliver and Leonard.

The sun had started to set while we were storing the net and the other equipment in Teller’s garage and when I returned to the beach, the bonfire had just been lit.

Little by little even those who had not been part of the game earlier, trickled down to the beach from the garden and gathered around the fire. Someone brought blankets, others wine, but no one bothered anymore with the food that had been served earlier.

The flames of the fire quickly gained in size as they licked the firewood piled up on the sand, and I found my way to Oliver who asked if I was having fun.

“Sure.”

If he picked up on my sarcasm, he didn’t let it show. I sat down next to him by the bonfire and he shifted, clearly gauging how close to me it would be appropriate for him to be. I understood, but the forced distance saddened me nevertheless. His foot was bare on the sand and I would have wanted to slip mine under it, dig a tunnel into the grains with my toes until they found their way home beneath his sole.

Had we been here alone, I would have done that, and not stopped there. My toes from my other foot would have caressed the top of his, just like in the old, early days when we had barely started plotting our course to each other. And just like the old days, I would have climbed over to his lap, straddling him and refusing to turn around even though he would have tried to get me to sit facing the flames.

“You’re missing it,” he would have said, laughing.

“I would rather watch your face as you watch the flames,” I would have replied, and he would have convinced me that if he had my face in front of him, no flame in the world would have made him look elsewhere.

 

 

Joe tapped me on the shoulder, shaking me out of my thoughts, and recruited me to help him carry a few beach chairs down from the cottage, because he didn’t want Teller to have to sit on the sand with his bad back.

By the time we returned, someone had taken out a guitar and was stumbling his way through something resembling a Bob Dylan song, and I tried not to wince as he was hitting more wrong notes than right ones.

Teller sat down in the offered chair, affectionally grazing Joe’s cheek as a thank you. The crowd around us was talking in small groups and enjoying the clear night, with only swirls of the warm bonfire smoke occasionally wafting through the ocean air.

I searched again for my spot next to Oliver but while I had been gone, the spot had, unsurprisingly, become occupied by my now sworn enemy. Leonard sat next to Oliver decidedly nonchalant, huddled within a blanket, but I had no doubt he had vied for the place by Oliver’s side as soon as I had left.

I settled for a place across from them and watched Oliver through the bonfire, his eyes catching mine through the flames and the shadows playing on his face.

I missed him terribly even if he was only a few feet away, and Leonard now turning to whisper something to him didn’t help. I so wished I could have walked over to them, telling Leonard that he needed to move because that was my blanket, my place, my Oliver.

As someone more skilled took upon the guitar and filled the air on the beach with a languid melody that didn’t hurt my ears anymore, I looked on at Oliver and Leonard conversing and wondered why I had never thought of this specific concern before. That there would be others, like me, desperate for Oliver’s attention. I had been furiously jealous of his wife, but it had never occurred to me to truly worry about the other men he would meet. Our relationship had seemed so singular, to both of us, that nothing resembling it had had any place in my thoughts.

 

 

After the dusk arrived and a few more bottles of wine had been brought down from the cottage, someone suggested a game of Truth and Dare.

“This may get dangerous; anyone remember last year?” Evelyn tried to warn, but the crowd was now raucous enough that no one paid attention. Someone brushed her off saying that what happened at Teller and Joe’s bonfire, stayed at Teller and Joe’s bonfire.

The questions and dares started out tame, only slightly uncomfortable, but became more risqué as darkness fell and the evening went on.

When it came to be Oliver’s turn, I could see that he debated between choosing truth or dare, but went with a dare.

He was dared to go swimming.

“That’s it?”

“Without any clothes.”

“Oh, I see. That’s how you people want to play this game.” Oliver shook his head but laughed as he got up, wanting to appear as if he wasn’t one to shy from a challenge. He wiped the sand off of his shorts and started walking further down the beach, keeping going until we could only make out his outline in the dark. Only then did he stop and start to undress.

“Not fair,” Evelyn and the others yelled after him when he finally dipped into the water.

“Some decency, people!” was his reply echoing from the other end of the beach.

Half of the party grumbled that he had fudged the rules, the other half was impressed by his finding a loophole. A few had already stopped paying attention as they were more interested in filling up their wine glasses or kissing someone.

I, for one, was happy that the others hadn’t seen everything that was mine, but what was already on display made me ache for him. From the distance, his form was blurry, but my memory supplied the details.

 

 

When Oliver returned to the bonfire, hair wet and the flames playing off of the last drops of ocean glistening on his skin, it was his turn to choose.

“So who’s next? There were many of you protesting so eagerly a minute ago that you must have wanted your turn.”

He had only put his shorts back on and in the absence of a towel as often happens with impromptu swims, was drying himself on a blanket. Leonard looked up at him, sitting on the sand and once again I felt queasy seeing how his eyes worshipped Oliver’s body.

Had I been this obvious? And similarly to me, did Leonard think he was going to have closer contact with him?

I thought of the time when I hadn’t yet mapped out every groove, crease, and bump of Oliver’s body. The smallest of small fractions of me was sorry for Leonard that he would never experience that. It had been one of the best things I had gotten to do in my life, and I would forever pity the people who had to live without ever knowing the way Oliver’s knee curved under one’s hand.

 

 

The game continued, dares getting bolder and truths becoming more daring. When Evelyn had cleared her turn, she chose Leonard, who, to my strange satisfaction, chose truth instead of a dare. Suggestions for questions were immediately flying in the air but Evelyn shushed all of them, saying she already had one in mind.

“Have you ever kissed a teacher?”

The question was met by a barrage of shouts saying she needed to choose another question; this was inappropriate; she would get a note from human resources.

“No, no, I don’t mind, I can answer,” Leonard insisted. “I haven’t, but there have been some occasions where I… I have definitely wanted to.”

At least he had the decency to blush and to look away. Still, when the next round started and the attention was shifted away from him, his gaze at Oliver was so brazen that I had had enough.

It was Joe’s turn next, and while the others were trying to think of a suitable dare for him, I muttered to no one in particular that I was cold and was going to get my sweater. The dare suggestions still echoing behind me, I ran to the cottage with no intention of returning to the game.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go; the story will continue again next Monday. Thank you for reading and all your comments!


	7. Chapter 7

I sat down in the swing in the garden. The yard was empty, but the muted voices of the others carried from the beach in the distance, interspersed with squeals. I wondered if anyone would even notice that I was missing or realize why.

Oliver found me there a little while later.

“I would ask you if you’re okay but you’re clearly not.”

“How perceptive of you,” I muttered, then adding as if he hadn’t noticed: “I’m also a little drunk. Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too. This evening hasn’t gone as well as it could have. May I?” Oliver sat down next to me in the swing. “I don’t want to kiss him, nor would I let him kiss me.”

So he had not only noticed I was gone, but knew why I had left.

“He’s going to try,” I asserted.

“Then I will have to tell him no.”

“Is it only because you think you can’t do that? With a student? With me, you first wanted to be good but then succumbed when I was persistent.”

“Persistent?”

“I was, wasn’t I? He seems determined, too.” I picked at the chipped paint on the swing.

A smile began to play on Oliver’s face. “It wasn’t because you were persistent.”

“I didn’t win you over?”

“There was no need. I always wanted you, more than you did and definitely more than you knew. But I only gave in when you repeatedly gave me signs that you wanted it, too.”

“He surely gives you signs,” I sulked.

“But I don’t want him. I don’t want anyone but you. These thoughts, these words,” he said as he smoothed my temple and thumbed over my lips.

I moved closer to him on the swing. “What else?”

“This body,” he rubbed my forearm, “–and this.” His hand had found my lap and cupped me.

I took a sharp breath and my cock reacted instantly to his touch. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

I looked at Oliver’s lips. The driest patches were stained purple with the red wine that he had switched to after the party had run out of gin. “But is that how I looked like back then, too? That obvious?”

“You tried to hide it. You did wear sunglasses a lot.” His eyes locked to mine, he grazed the outline of my cock through my slacks, thumbed the seam of the fabric as I shifted under his touch. “But I desperately wanted to see a signal that you might like me too, so I paid attention.”

Something rustled in the walking path. It was perhaps just the wind because no one came, but Oliver turned to look just in case. He kept his eyes on the tall hydrangea shrubs lining the path when he admitted: “You know, you’re not the only one who thinks about losing the other.”

Teller’s words about the Star of Africa flashed in my mind. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone could try to seduce you with, say, rare first editions,” he said pointedly, now turning his eyes on me again, and squeezed my cock once almost hard enough for it to hurt, before he let go of me.

“I asked you to come with us to the library. And are you seriously suggesting I would do something, to cheat on you?”

“No,” he sighed. “No. Sometimes it just seems incredible that you would want me at all. Why would you choose me when you could have anyone? People are all falling for you here. Teller’s impressed, Evelyn is smitten. You even won over my mother.”

“Not instantly. And I definitely don’t want your mother.” I climbed clumsily onto his lap in the swing, I didn’t care anymore if someone saw. “Elio, Elio, Elio,” I whispered in his ear. “I live in you and have no plans to leave. Heart of hearts, remember.”

“I have the postcard so that I would.”

I kissed the corner of his lip, licked one of the wine stains. “Can we go home now?”

 

 

I would have done an Irish goodbye, slipping out of the gate without telling anyone, but Oliver disagreed.

“I left my jacket at the beach. And we can’t leave without thanking Teller and Joe, you goose.”

He was quiet for the entire walk back to the bonfire and I found out why, when we reached our hosts. They were surrounded by everyone else and people were in high spirits; by the looks of it the games had continued while we had been gone.

“Thanks Teller, thanks Joe, it’s been a great night as usual, but Elio and I are getting tired, so we’re leaving home now.”

As he spoke, he placed his hand on my back, low, to a spot only a lover would. His fingers found their place around my waist and when he pulled me tightly to his side, it wasn’t a written statement, nor an overt announcement, but it was a clear enough message and more than enough for now. He smiled when I dared to brush my cheek against his shoulder and the conversation of the group quieted down to an odd murmur or two as they watched us.

Teller looked at us fondly, nodding to me almost imperceptibly. “Well, thank you for coming, and it was great to meet you, Elio. We look forward to seeing you both again.”

Perhaps I should have checked up on Leonard’s face in that moment, but I found that it didn’t matter anymore, and all I saw was Oliver’s face as he looked at me tenderly even though his words were addressed to the others.

“Good night everyone, we’ll see you back in the city.”

 

 

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said when we reached the street on our bikes.

“Yes, I think I did.”

“They are going to talk.”

“Let them talk.”

“You are going to have to answer a million questions next week.”

“Beats having to talk about the weather and the god-awful heat.”

“Oliver,” I tried to reason with him, “–do you realize what you’ve done?”

“I think so, and if you don’t stop with the questions soon then I’m going to have to kiss you to shut you up.”

It took one mile and two more questions from me to get Oliver to hop off of his bike and make good of his threat.

 

 

Having had to share the other with the people at the party all evening, we were both in a desperate hurry to belong only to each other again. After the kiss in the middle of the dark road – the kiss that had started playfully threatening from Oliver’s side and with me laughing into it but which had grown deep and passionate – we eagerly raced our bikes home.

Once inside and our shirts quickly lost on the floor in the hallway, Oliver was determined to show I was everything he would ever need.

“If they want to steal my heart after I’m dead, like they did to your beloved Shelley, they can’t find it in my body. It’s in here,” he whispered and leaned down to kiss my chest. My hand sank gratefully in his hair that was still coarse from the salt water of his night swim during the game.

His palm caressed my bare waist and his finger hooked in the waistband of my summer slacks, pulling them down from my hip on one side as he dropped to his knees to trail his lips over the exposed skin. He kept lowering my pants until they were pooled at my ankles along with my underwear and he had access to kiss the base of my cock, tongue licking the length until his mouth reached the tip and he gave it a slow suck, and then another.

“I want to have you, Oliver,” I said quietly when he came up for air and kissed the top of my thigh. “If you’ll let me.”

He looked up, the same stars in his eyes that had been on the sky when he had shot me to the moon at the beach that past Sunday and nodded.

I pulled him up and laced my fingers with his, kissing his palm. He cupped the nape of my neck and said: “You know I’m yours.”

“Do I?”

“You’re definitely mine, so by extension, that means…”

He pulled me to his lips and I stood naked on my tiptoes to kiss him.

 

 

I had sobered from my most intense inebriation, but the idea, no matter how hypothetical, that Oliver could trade me for someone like Leonard had left me unsettled, and I didn’t quite know how to deal with it except reclaim him as mine as ferociously as I could. While my cock wasn’t going to leave any visible trace, I wanted to simultaneously forge marks that would stay even when I lost him to the outside world again. The metallic taste on his lips told me people would know I had been there.

But Oliver’s abrupt clutch on the sheets broke the spell and made me worry that I had hurt him in my intensity.

“Go on,” he assured me, panting.

I didn’t believe him; he knew how my mind worked and must have thought that if he resisted, I would take it as a sign of holding back. He would offer himself to me to convince me of our bond, even at the cost of his own discomfort.

I stopped moving. “No, I’m hurting you.”

“Yes, but it’ll be fine in a bit.”

I pulled myself out far enough to see him relax again, kissed his one knee, licked the dew of sweat off of the other.

“Oliver, we don’t have to do this.”

“We do, just give me a second and it’ll be fine.” He took a deep breath and swallowed, as if to prepare.

I pulled out completely and laid down next to him, caressed his chest. “Sorry.”

I wasn’t embarrassed about my need for him, but scared and ashamed that it had overtaken me so easily. We didn’t have many secrets left, but shining a light on this jealous corner of my mind had now brought one of my last ones to his knowledge.

“I’m sorry I was so eager,” I repeated.

“Elio, stop saying that. I know why you were. And I can do this, it’s only because we haven’t done this in a while.”

He was right. I had topped him the night I had arrived in Boston. We had wanted to do everything that night, everything, and had not left his apartment until very late the next evening, but after that, he hadn’t let me be his top and I hadn’t had a need to. Relishing in him in other ways had been plenty.

“We don’t have to,” I repeated.

He didn’t reply with words, but pulled me back on top of him. “Please. If you still want.”

“Of course I do. But, slow.”

My fervent need to claim him had dissolved amidst the concern that he was trying to please me at his own expense. It wasn’t important anymore that I marked him, that I conquered him like a distant mountain where I would get to plant a flag for everyone to see.

The kisses became tender and in between them, I told him I had missed him all night.

“I was right there,” he said, his palms sliding up my back in large strokes.

“Too far,” I said. “Whenever I can’t touch you it’s always too far.”

I was half-way in him by then; his discomfort had evaporated along with my restlessness.

“I missed you too.”

“I didn’t know where I belonged,” I panted, sliding yet again further, watching him eventually relax under the stretch.

“You belong here. In me. Only you,” he breathed as he welcomed me all the way in.

It took me a little while to be sure I could start moving, but then I found the right angle and he bit into his arm overwhelmed with pleasure and I almost lost the match when he arched his back just so.

“We should do this–,” he panted raggedly but held off from continuing for so long that I had time to breathe into his ear that _yes, we were doing this right now_.

“–more often,” he explained when he got a hold of his words again.

I pressed my open mouth to his lips when I came and as so often, seeing and feeling my pleasure was the final drop for him too.

 

 

I watched him lying under me, between my body and the soft flowery sheets. This was one of my favorite Olivers. Flushed and all mine. I collapsed beside him, both of us staring at the ceiling, our breaths the only sounds in the room until something occurred to me.

“What if they thought that we came tonight as friends but somehow got together at the party?”

Oliver smiled, took a hold of my hand. “Why would you say that?”

“We could have. I was clearly won over by your volleyball serves. Not to mention your almost naked body after that swim.”

“That was a stupid dare. They knew I wouldn’t do it in front of them.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. This is mine.” I moved to kiss below his stomach, then the base of his spent cock. I rested my temple on his hip and looked up at his lips, swollen and red from my fervent treatment of them earlier. I felt sorry for my urge to ravage them.

He touched his lips and seemed to read my mind, because after a silence, he started: “Remember the morning you had to wear a sleeved shirt in Boston even though it was extremely hot outside?”

I kissed his hip. “Yes?”

“Because I had bitten you on the shoulder too roughly the previous night.”

“Yes.”

“It was the night when we had gone to that restaurant by the park, and that good-looking waiter had flirted with you.”

I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t recall anything like that. “Was that the French restaurant?”

Oliver shook his head. “No, the Italian.”

“Italian… You mean the waiter with the yellow shoelaces?”

“That’s what you remember?” Oliver asked, with an odd relief in his laugh.

I shrugged. That’s what I remembered.

Then it dawned on me: “That’s why you didn’t want to stay there for dessert? Because you thought he was flirting with me?”

Oliver had paid the check as soon as it had arrived and whisked me back home, devouring me already in the foyer, rougher than he normally was. I had thought he had just been drunker and thus more careless.

Oliver was embarrassed. “Yes. He obviously thought we were just friends and I found myself not liking it at all. It’s different when people know, because I do trust you. But the feeling when they think they can just try and...”

“They can’t.”

I crawled back to the top of the bed and, laying my head on Oliver’s shoulder, began to truly believe in the possibility that he was just as afraid of losing me as I was of him. When our relationship was without a public declaration and was seen by so few, it was easy to feed into our fears.

“I am so deliriously happy with you that it scares me. What if all of this goes away?” I said softly, dragged my blunt nails up along his forearm, turning his skin temporarily white in their wake. One ragged edge of my nail scratched him and I reached down to kiss it better.

“Didn’t I tell you on our last morning in Paris that if you do decide to come and meet me in Vienna, I’m never letting go of you again? I intend to keep that promise.”

 

 

Oliver woke me up the next morning when it was barely dawn.

“What’s wrong?” I asked with one eye half-open and my throat dry and raspy from sleep.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m heading down to the water.”

“Are you going there to think?”

“Yes. But I would prefer to do it with you. Will you come?”

 

 

The morning fog hung thick as we padded down to the beach. I yawned and stretched my arms before sitting down next to Oliver on the edge of a large smooth rock.

“We leave from Cape Cod today,” he said. “Yet another place where I have been happy with you.”

We exchanged a slow, languid kiss that neither of us needed to take further. It was fitting as it was, for the quiet morning where the time and the world stood still save for the occasional flap of a seagull’s wing.

I bumped my head on his shoulder. “Next, we can add Milan to the list. Did I tell you that every time I call home, I can hear Mafalda in the background asking when she gets to cook for the _muvi star_ again? She knows we’ll fly back together, but she hardly cares about me at all.”

“She’ll get her _muvi star_ soon enough in September.”

“My _muvi star_. Mine,” I corrected tenderly, tracing one fingertip down his jaw. “Do you really think your mother will come to Milan to visit us?”

“I don’t know. I hope she will.”

I yawned again, and Oliver smiled. “You can go back to sleep if you want.”

“No, I want to stay here with you,” I insisted but it was far too early, and my eyelids kept wanting to fall shut.

Oliver wrapped an arm around me, and I huddled closer. His sweater was deliciously thick, and the yarn was soft against my cheek.

“Want to stay. With you,” I repeated but it came out mumbled as I was already drifting back to sleep.

Oliver pressed a kiss on the top of my head and arranged me to a more comfortable position within his arms.

The ocean waves crashed to the shore with a calming precision and I registered a foghorn vaguely in the distance, as Oliver sat with his thoughts and I slept soundly against his chest.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“…it left me feeling as restful and at peace with the world as I would feel years later on hearing a distant foghorn off Cape Cod in the middle of the night.“_ – André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name
> 
> This bit from the novel was the original inspiration for this summer sequel, as I wanted to create a universe where Elio would be with Oliver when he would hear the ‘foghorn off Cape Cod’ and that’s where we leave them now. 
> 
> Thank you so very much for reading this story where I got to return to these versions of these two. I gratefully appreciate all the support, comments, kudos, and messages.

**Author's Note:**

> I always love to hear what you think, and you can also find me on Tumblr at: [angel-in-new-york-city](http://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com)


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